Chrysler Once Built The Ultimate American Supercar
Few ambitions run deeper in American automotive culture than the desire to out-exotic the Europeans on their own terms — building a supercar that’s faster, more dramatic, and more technically sophisticated than anything coming out of Maranello or Stuttgart. It’s a challenge that has inspired some genuinely brilliant machines over the decades, and a few spectacular misfires. But every once in a while, an American manufacturer produces something so jaw-dropping that the entire industry stops and stares. The Chrysler ME Four-Twelve was exactly that kind of car — a mid-2000s concept that didn’t just promise supercar performance, it promised hypercar performance, wrapped in one of the most striking bodies ever penned on American soil.
That’s exactly what Chrysler managed in the 2000s with a bona fide supercar that looked out of this world and boasted performance figures unlike almost anything else we’d seen at the time. It also came very close to becoming a fully-fledged production car that anyone with enough money could buy.
The Chrysler ME Four-Twelve Almost Became The Greatest American Supercar
|
Engine |
 80 autotech Power |
Torque |
0-60 MPH |
|---|---|---|---|
|
6.0-liter quad-turbocharged V12 |
850 hp |
850 lb-ft |
2.9 seconds |
Chrysler has made plenty of fantastic concept cars over the years. There was the Hemi V8-powered Firepower that could have rivalled cars like the Aston Martin V8 Vantage, the awesome Chrysler Turbine Car from the ’60s, and the fully-electric Airflow concept that resurrected the name of the classic streamliner for the modern era.
The Chrysler ME Four-Twelve has to be its best, though. Debuted at the North American International Auto Show in 2004, this was a full-blooded supercar in every sense of the term. It arrived at the very end of the era of traditional supercar engineering, and you can really tell. It has a striking design, with spaceship-like angular lines and massive air intakes flanking the body. Those intakes feed one of the most insane engines ever dropped into a Chrysler concept car: a heavily boosted, quad-turbocharged V12 producing a claimed 850 hp and 850 lb-ft of torque. Chrysler reckoned that was enough to launch the ME Four-Twelve from 0–60 mph in just 2.9 seconds and on to a top speed of 248 mph. Those figures would still be impressive today and firmly place the ME Four-Twelve in hypercar territory.
The ME Four-Twelve Had Some Of The Best Engineering Of Its Day
The Chrysler ME Four-Twelve was a remarkably advanced machine in terms of how it was constructed. The body was made entirely of carbon fiber, bonded to a carbon fiber and aluminum honeycomb chassis — a combination that made the car both incredibly light and exceptionally rigid. So strong, in fact, that as a prototype it was able to meet all U.S. crash safety regulations. Weight savings continued inside the cabin as well, with carbon fiber seats keeping the interior mass in check.
The advanced engineering didn’t stop with the body, either. It featured some of the most sophisticated aerodynamics available in a road-going supercar of the early-to-mid 2000s, including an active rear wing that extended rearward by 100 mm (roughly 3.9 inches) at high speed to generate additional downforce. Its transmission was equally cutting-edge for the era: a 7-speed dual-clutch unit designed by Ricardo — the same engineering firm behind the gearbox in the Bugatti Veyron. Suffice it to say, it was more than up to the task of handling 850 hp.
An Executive’s Passion Project
The ME Four-Twelve project was spearheaded by Wolfgang Bernhard, Chrysler’s COO at the time. He was incredibly passionate about it, claiming that it “represents the ultimate engineering and design statement from Chrysler.” He was also keen to stress that it was “not really a concept car” but rather “a prototype that will be road-ready this summer.” He genuinely wanted to build it, and he appeared to have both public demand and the Chrysler brand itself behind him. There was even talk at the time that Chrysler could build as many as 300 ME Four-Twelves per year if the interest was there.
An American Supercar, With A Bit Of German Engineering
Given that this car wears an American badge and was built by one of the most quintessentially American brands of all time, you might expect the Chrysler ME Four-Twelve to be all-American under the skin. You’d be wrong. The ME Four-Twelve owes a meaningful part of its existence to a legendary German manufacturer: Mercedes-Benz.
The Chrysler ME Four-Twelve was born during the DaimlerChrysler era, when Mercedes-Benz and Chrysler were part of the same corporate family. That arrangement gave Chrysler access to Mercedes-Benz parts and engineering resources. If you’ve ever wondered why the Chrysler Crossfire shared so much DNA with the Mercedes-Benz SLK of that era, that relationship is your answer.
Thanks to that corporate partnership, Chrysler was able to draw on Mercedes-Benz’s legendary 6.0-liter V12 engine as a starting point. They didn’t leave it stock, of course — four turbochargers were added in the process, which is precisely how Chrysler arrived at those extraordinary power figures.
Why Was The ME Four-Twelve Never Produced?
The Chrysler ME Four-Twelve wasn’t just a fancy show car. It was a fully working prototype, and it could realistically have been developed into a limited production model. There was genuine public demand for exactly that. The ME Four-Twelve captured imaginations worldwide, and Chrysler appeared ready to pull the trigger on a production run, with an estimated price somewhere between $250,000 and $750,000 being floated. But it never happened — and here’s why.
The answer, unfortunately, traces back to the Daimler side of the DaimlerChrysler partnership. Mercedes-Benz was not pleased with the ME Four-Twelve’s existence, viewing it as potential internal competition for the Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren. The SLR McLaren had consumed years of development and enormous investment, and Mercedes-Benz was fiercely proud of it. The prospect of a stablemate that promised significantly higher performance and was generating comparable public excitement was not something the Stuttgart brand was willing to accept. They made their opposition to a production ME Four-Twelve known in no uncertain terms.
The development team behind the Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren allegedly went so far as to formally protest the ME Four-Twelve’s continued development. Chrysler ultimately had to stand down and defer to Mercedes-Benz’s demands in the interest of preserving the DaimlerChrysler merger — a merger that was doomed regardless. Not long afterward, Daimler sold off Chrysler due to persistent internal friction between the two brands.
Is Mercedes-Benz Entirely To Blame?
It’s tempting to lay the blame for the ME Four-Twelve’s demise entirely at Mercedes-Benz’s door — after all, Mercedes was the loudest voice of opposition within DaimlerChrysler. But other factors may have worked against the car as well. Some have speculated that Chrysler might never have been able to recoup its development costs even if a production version had reached customers. That’s a reasonable concern. The ME Four-Twelve would have been extraordinarily expensive, even by supercar standards, and its exotic construction — so far removed from anything else in Chrysler’s lineup — would have made it costly to manufacture at any meaningful volume. Had sales fallen short of projections, the financial exposure could have been severe.
Could The Chrysler ME-412 Have Been Successful?
With Mercedes-Benz having effectively blocked the ME Four-Twelve from ever reaching production, there are a couple of questions we’ll never be able to answer definitively. We’ll never know how refined it could have become as a production car, and we’ll never truly know whether it would have been a commercial success. We can speculate, though — and the honest assessment is that it might not have performed as well in the marketplace as Chrysler had hoped.
Supercar buyers are notoriously brand-conscious. The Acura NSX (sold as the Honda NSX outside North America) always struggled to be taken seriously as a true supercar despite its badge, even though it is clearly one of the most influential supercars ever made and served as a benchmark for the McLaren F1, one of the greatest supercars of all time.
That same prejudice would likely have dogged the ME Four-Twelve. Even if it had delivered on every performance claim and become the fastest production supercar in the world, that alone might not have been enough to lure buyers away from Ferraris, Lamborghinis, and the SLR McLaren itself.
Source: Chrysler.
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